


The Passenger

by bespectacled



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen, Other, POV Second Person, Weirdness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 06:04:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bespectacled/pseuds/bespectacled
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil seemed to know you, recognise you – he didn’t ask who you were, where you were from. He accepted you. When he tells the stories (and it warms whatever you have that passes for a heart when he does) he refers to you as his travelling partner, and that’s how you’ve come to think of yourself. He’d shown no sign of knowing that you’ve been travelling with him for much longer than Svitz.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Passenger

You had been waiting for Svitz.

You were very proud of yourself, managing to negotiate your Cecil to this place, this place you were dully aware of – though it was only as you arrived that you realised you had been waiting, that you realised you had been leading him here.

It was only in Svitz that you came to feel the oddness of your situation – for so long, you have been with Cecil, beside him, inside him, _with him_ , but it is only now that he is aware of you. It is only now that you have a body, a presence of your own. 

Unfortunately, the oddness has remained with you, long after leaving (and you know that you can never go back, even if you knew the way, even if you believed there was a way back) and now you are frustrated by a situation you hadn’t really been aware until Svitz.

Still. You are glad you were able to know him, and perhaps, one day, there will be another place. Perhaps you are already leading him there.

Cecil seemed to know you, recognise you – he didn’t ask who you were, where you were from. He accepted you. When he tells the stories (and it warms whatever you have that passes for a heart when he does) he refers to you as his travelling partner, and that’s how you’ve come to think of yourself. He’d shown no sign of knowing that you’ve been travelling with him for much longer than Svitz.

You stood beside him, walked beside him, trudging up the hill that never quite ended and never quite began, a hill that was more a circular slope, waiting to trip the both of you up. You never minded the rolling, the falling – a part of you was simply exhilarated to have a body that could feel, that could bump and bruise and ache and hurt. 

Often when you looked at him time shifted and twisted. You saw him now, your saw his past, you saw his future. You saw the looking glass. You saw Carlos. You saw his double. Your newfound body ached and hurt at the sight of his futures unfurling before your eyes as he smiled, took your hand and guided you back upwards, not asking why you cried. It was difficult, sometimes, to look at him and see all that – difficult to look at him through physical eyes and be witness to it. In your more abstract form you suppose you are used to it, but the trappings of biology made it feel unnatural and unnerving – it removed itself from your control, your physicality forcing you to pay a price you hadn’t known about.

Sometimes you felt yourself shift, felt your body move and change, felt your soul alter. Sometimes your albino skin seemed to darken, your hair retracted into your head, your eyes took on colour, your horns retracted, your hips widened, your hands and feet grew. He would touch the alteration, smile, and accept, never needing to ask questions you weren’t certain you could answer. You never really knew it was your body not being sure of what it wanted to be, if it was you settling on a shape, or if it was the way he saw you that changed. 

Besides, as he’d said softly once before kissing new lips, there are worse things in life than to metamorphose. 

It is selfish, you know, but you wish it could have gone on forever, rolling down that hill with him, feeling his fingertips against your skin, tracing patterns that, occasionally, would appear in technicolour. You can recall the feel of his breath on your neck, the tension underneath your fingertips as you stroked muscles that had just survived a particularly nasty fall. You can still see those muscles as he sits, hunched in his chair, speaking to his beloved Night Vale. If you can find a way, you will teach Carlos where to touch, so that your Cecil may know your relief again. 

You love him. You loved him then, you love him still, you will love him in the future. You know this – it is a fact, as sure as you are here, you love him. And you are with him – that is, after all, the important thing. You will always be with him. You will see him happy, happier than he ever was those few short lifetimes in Svitz. 

You are fairly certain that his happiness is why Svitz ended, why he left, and why you woke up without and within him again. You don’t know how it happened, any more than you really know how you got there, but one morning he was alone, and you were with him. The landscape had changed, and only his bruises told the truth – bruises that faded, in time. 

You remembered everything, and, even though he didn’t know what it meant, so did he. 

And you are still with him, as you will be forever.

**Author's Note:**

> I..yeah, I don't even know. This is one of those plotbunnies that got into my head and wouldn't leave. It's also the first fic I've written in Quite A Long Time. I don't think I should be that surprised that Night Vale got under my skin, though -and my, does it itch.
> 
> Constructive criticism is pretty much begged for, since I'm not entirely convinced how much sense this makes. Funny that a second-person, shape-shifting (ish) protagonist is so clearly defined in my head, I'm not sure how well they appear on the page.


End file.
